


Step by Step, Inch by Inch

by pragma (CarlileLovesAnime)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Amnesia, Canon Universe, Eremin Week II, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 14:50:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1652576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarlileLovesAnime/pseuds/pragma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Eren wakes from a two-week coma, he finds, to his horror, that he doesn't remember anything. He doesn't remember what military branch he's in. He doesn't remember that titans killed his mother. </p>
<p>He doesn't even remember who Armin is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Step by Step, Inch by Inch

**Author's Note:**

> hi y'all! this is a fic for eremin week ii and holy wow am i excited. prompts [here](http://burpingstars.tumblr.com/post/85108497421/calling-all-ereminions-eremin-week-ii-will-be). today's prompt is "first meet". 
> 
> i love eremin to death and i want to use this fic to address some of my own disillusionment with the canon storyline, particularly the progression of their relationship therein. also, i'm trying something a little different with this fic. hopefully the experiment pays off. 
> 
> thank you to lore (mistral-heiress/quarrelswithquills @ tumblr, WhisperingOrchard @ ao3) for beta-reading and being as supportive as she always is C: 
> 
> lastly, warning for mentions of vomiting in chapter one.

All of his senses are assaulted at once:   
His mouth   
stings with the tastes of blood and bile.   
He smells old wood, soap, chemicals, and the faint, festering stench of illness.   
Dust floats   
in pale beams   
that come down from the nearby window.   
The room is a little cold, but not cold enough to be uncomfortable—chilly, perhaps—   
and he’s lying in a bed and there’s a hand   
wrapped around his, dry and strong.   
Behind him, a clock ticks.

“Eren?”   
His eyes follow the noise to the young woman holding his hand. She looks so relieved   
she could cry.   
“Eren.” She lunges forth,   
grabs him by the waist and holds his limp body in a hug.

He barely moves, scanning the rest of the room   
over her shoulder.   
There are rows   
upon rows   
of empty   
white beds.

At length   
she pulls away   
and lets him down gently. “Oh, I was starting   
to worry you would never   
wake up.”   
He just looks at her   
with squinted eyes and furrowed brows,   
and something in her expression changes very quickly.

“Hold on,”   
she says, tapping his hand once   
as if in promise.

He watches her walk out of the room.

Not much later, someone entirely different comes in,   
wearing glasses   
and carrying a clipboard. She sits   
at the edge of the chair at his bedside.   
“Hi,” she says—slowly,   
softly, a tiptoe of a tone. “How are you feeling,   
Eren?”

“Okay,” he says   
after a moment.

She nods. “Good.   
No pain anywhere?”   
He thinks and shakes his head.

“Do you know who I am?”

He tries,   
chewing over her voice,   
studying   
her face—   
the prominent cheekbones,   
the attentive eyes and he thinks   
for a second that he may have something,   
but it escapes him. A sour weight sinks from his throat to his gut   
as he shakes his head.

Her face constricts a little and she   
centers her glasses, smooths her bangs   
back and off her forehead. And she asks again, “Are you sure?”

Yes, he’s sure.   
She leans back, frowning.   
“I’m Hange Zoe. I’m   
one of your commanding officers.   
Can you tell me who _you_ are?”

“My name is Eren—Eren Yeager,” he replies,   
but his voice lilts upward   
when he says his last name,   
like there’s a right answer to this   
and he can only recognize it   
if it’s in front of him, printed, solid.

The air feels colder,   
all the sudden.

She comes up with more questions,   
simple ones asked in a clinical   
tone of voice. He would say they’re too simple,   
almost insulting but he doesn’t complain because   
he can feel the expression on her face   
while she says them,   
and to some   
honestly he cannot find an answer at all.   
What year is it?   
Where are we?   
Who is our commander? Who is our queen?   
What is that around your neck? A key? To what?   
He wants to throw up;   
maybe his innards spilled in a red   
pile on the floor   
would hold the secrets,   
physically, to why he feels   
like he’s spun in a circle too many times and he has to move through a room   
full of blurs.   
If he could dig through his own ribs to find what she’s hunting for.   
Thinking about it makes him gag.   
His hand flies to his mouth and she goes silent—.

“Okay,” she mumbles. She lifts the pen   
with which she’s been diligently scribbling on the clipboard for the duration of this exchange,   
wedges it behind her ear, and moves to walk out of the room.

His hand reaches out to her. “Wait,”   
he calls, “Please.”   
She stops and turns toward him in an eager way. “Yes?”   
“Is something wrong with me?” he finds himself shouting.

She—  
Hange   
thins her lips, tears   
her gaze away from him and lifts the clipboard.   
“We’ll have to see.”   
She turns and starts toward the door again,   
and stops, again,   
and peers over her shoulder at his face. There’s a pair of   
frustrated creases between his eyebrows,   
and a lost, frightened pallor to his cheeks.   
It’s freezing in here.   
“No.

“You’re fine.”

Her smile   
that follows   
is forced.   
She fixes her glasses and   
leaves him alone   
with the dancing dust   
and the stagnant smell   
of sick. He leans over the bedside and almost pukes and his back   
hits the mattress so fast after that.

***

She leads more people into the room   
like a funeral procession.   
Hange, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

He sits up when his name is called. His stomach   
_burns_.   
Hange opens her mouth and then seems to interrupt herself.   
“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” she asks,   
eyebrows drawn toward each other. He nods. He can’t quite breathe.

The six non-Hanges stand   
at the foot of his bed and they all sorta   
stare at him and they   
carry themselves like they’re terribly out of place.   
One has bruises and scabbed-over cuts on his face. One’s arm is in a sling.   
One can’t seem to close his mouth.

“Eren, do you   
recognize any of these people?”

She gestures at them.   
He scans over their faces   
one at a time, making sure   
to note their features and slap them up next to any comparable image   
he may have hidden in his head,   
but there is none.   
His chest constricts—he forces his mouth open and thrusts   
an arm with a pointing finger   
toward one of them,   
a girl,   
a girl with black hair and a scar under her eye   
and a limp, she had a slight limp when she came in.   
“I do recognize you,”   
he declares,   
though the lack of air   
weighs down any potential smile. He drops his arm.   
“Though, that’s just because   
you were there when I woke up.”

The black-haired girl is a little unsure how to feel about this. She swallows down   
the breath held captive in her chest.

“That’s your sister Mikasa,” Hange says.   
He scrutinizes the girl again and his face scrunches.   
“I have a sister?”

“Stop playing games,   
Yeager,” spits the sling-armed man.

Eren feels like he’s been shot.

Hange’s voice is scolding. “Levi, please.   
He just woke up.”   
His face doesn’t change;   
he continues to glare at the space beside Eren’s head,   
hard gray eyes   
inside deep gray rings.

“Eren.” Mikasa lays her hands on his feet   
and she’s half a body away but her eyes fix on his as if   
there’s no distance at all, and he decides   
in that instant that he likes the way   
she looks at him like that.   
“You don’t—.”

She squeezes around his toes   
through the fabric of the blanket. “You really   
don’t remember me?”

He wishes   
he could tell her otherwise,   
but he shakes his head no,   
and struggles to take in a deep breath   
against the tightness in his chest and the pressure of her gaze   
and wonders when it stopped stinking so badly   
in here—maybe the living   
chased out the dead   
and the lingering reek that came with it.

“You   
don’t remember   
anyone?”   
She hunches forward   
in some kind of   
prayer. “Please,   
you have to remember. You have to   
try.”

He _wishes_.

“I’m sorry,”   
he offers,   
but that doesn’t do anything for the guilt tugging at him,   
or the profound sorrow on her porcelain face.   
He really could throw up now.

Hange puts a hand   
on Mikasa’s shoulder,   
beckoning her off of him. “Well,”   
—her eyes are on him—   
“If that’s the case,   
then I guess   
some introductions are in order.   
You already met Mikasa   
and me.”

The raccoon-eyed,   
sling-armed man is Levi,   
as Eren could have deduced,   
another commanding officer,   
though Hange outranks him.   
The other girl is Sasha   
with the sad brown eyes.   
Connie, the gawker,   
is the shortest of the group,   
and there are notes scrawled on   
the backs of his hands.   
The blond boy who appears to have taken   
a couple bad blows to the head is Armin—

Eren points at him. “I feel like   
I should know you,” he says.   
“I mean,   
I should probably know all of you,   
but I don’t and I don’t know you either,   
but there’s something different about you,   
like there are feelings already attached.”   
Everyone but Hange glances at Armin,   
who looks not much affected, if   
a little mournful at the revelation.

—And the tallest one, the boy   
with the worried scowl, is Jean.

“Okay,” says Eren.   
He turns   
toward Armin again and squints,   
not intentionally rudely as he’s trying to figure out   
just what the bases are for these   
inexplicable emotions, and the urge to vomit   
subsides a little.   
Armin’s eyes settle   
anywhere but on him.

Out the window, the daylight   
has begun to strengthen with afternoon.

“What _do_ you know?” Jean asks, curtly,   
pulling Eren straight out   
of his concentration.

His first response is not even something he thinks through:   
“I know how to talk.”

“No shit,” Jean grumbles.   
But there’s nothing acidic   
to his voice   
at all.   
Mikasa stands properly,   
releasing his feet.

Eren ponders   
for a second or two.   
He sees an emblem   
on the side of Hange’s jacket, a coat of arms   
of sorts that reminds him of wings. _Something_ hits him—   
he can’t specify what, but.   
“There’s a war going on,” he says,   
and Hange nods smally.   
He looks at her face. “And I don’t know who against, but   
I’m assuming because you called yourself   
one of my commanding officers   
that we’re in the armed forces, fighting   
this war.”

“We all are,”   
Jean says.

He takes in a deep breath as though to congratulate   
himself on the fact that he got something right,   
for once. For a minute he stares vaguely ahead,   
and that’s about it, he declares with a shrug.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“ _Levi_ ,” Hange hisses. Eren can feel   
the collective sighing in front of him   
bringing down the temperature of the room,   
despite the slow warming powers of the sun, and he’s certain now   
that this is   
not   
a good thing.

“Look.” It’s like he’s fumbling   
to catch something he dropped, grasping, flushing,   
up in the air. God,   
he wants to throw up again. “I’m sorry   
I don’t know the situation. I’m   
sorry I don’t   
know who any of you are.”

Hange insists that   
it’s not his fault, but it is,   
he can’t shake the feeling that it is,   
the tense, heavy, hot feeling that   
it is.   
It is his fault that he’s   
such a huge

disappointment.

“We will fill you in on everything   
eventually,” Hange says, clearly working so very hard   
to keep her tone upbeat.

“Right now you look   
sick as a dog, though,” Jean points out,   
crossing his arms. “I’ve   
never seen you look this ill.”

She takes a step back. “Jean’s right—   
we’ll leave you to rest,   
for now.” With a wave she ushers   
everyone out the room after her   
in silence or with wishes to feel better soon;   
all except Mikasa, who doesn’t even ask   
for permission to remain   
at her brother’s side.

The door closes. Eren can hear   
the ticking of the clock again, and sense   
the slow, creeping return   
of the hospital smell.   
A cloud passes under the sun.

He gags—Mikasa sets an arm over   
his upper back. She’s chilled   
to the touch   
or maybe that’s just him.   
He brings his hand from his mouth and gasps,   
and she starts to rub circles into his shirt.   
He shudders as he takes one big deep breath in.   
“I’m sorry.”

“Stop,”   
she whispers.   
In a second the rhythmic rubbing ceases   
and she’s wrapping her arms around his chest   
from behind, the ends of her hair tickling his shoulders,   
her torso, taut with muscle, pressing   
against his back.   
“Stop.”

This room—everything   
feels hot, hot, itchy-hot, too hot.   
He hiccups,   
and lays a hand   
on her forearm. “I’m sorry.”

Her arms coil tighter.

He sniffles. “You’re my sister   
and I don’t even know you.”

She shushes him.   
“Stop.”   
She pulls away and steps around to face him,  
clutching the scarf around her neck   
with one hand and caressing his cheek with the other. “You need to rest,”   
she tells him. “Don’t worry   
about anything else.”   
She nudges him   
gently on the sternum   
to guide him onto his back   
and drags the blankets   
up to his chest.   
And she’s gone for a few seconds—he traces her footsteps,   
and when she returns she sits in the chair, scoots it closer   
and sets an empty wastebasket down by her side.

The clock seems very loud now. He turns   
onto his side, away from her,   
curls into a position   
that his stomach agrees with, and stifles sobs   
until he falls asleep.


End file.
